2016 outlook: tech to change the world

A few years ago there was a spate of concern about whether there was enough deep innovation.

Few argue this today and the range of innovations is arguably unprecedented – list below – and instead leading to the opposite concerns about what risks these breakthroughs could bring.

Only five years ago, Founders Fund, a venture capital firm set up by Peter Thiel, laid out a manifesto, What happened to the future, with a catchy subtitle: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

Last month, Thiel was part of a group of rich investors who set up the OpenAI institute to research artificial intelligence “to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return”.

Their concern was whether that while “it’s hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society, it’s equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly”.

There has been a long tradition of visionaries, from Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb who warned after the first explosion, “Now I have become Shiva, destroyer of worlds,” to Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, John Naisbitt’s Megatrends and Al Gore’s The Future. Even back in 1926, Nikola Tesla said: “When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole.”

The latest, historian Yuval Harari, author of the excellent Sapiens, in an Edge interview with Daniel Kahneman ahead of his next book, Homo Deus, due out in the autumn summed up the technological trends in AI and in other areas as: “The basic process is the decoupling of intelligence from consciousness…. The military and economic and political system doesn’t really need consciousness….

“Generally speaking, when you look at the 20th century, it’s the era of the masses, mass politics, mass economics. Every human being has value, has political, economic, and military value, simply because he or she is a human being….

“In the 21st century, there is a good chance that most humans will lose, they are losing, their military and economic value. Once, [however,] you are superfluous, you don’t have power….

“And the biggest question maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people. I don’t think we have an economic model for that….

“What we’re talking about now is like a second Industrial Revolution, but the product this time will not be textiles or machines or vehicles, or even weapons. The product this time will be humans themselves.

“We’re basically learning to produce bodies and minds. Bodies and minds are going to be the two main products of the next wave of all these changes. And if there is a gap between those that know how to produce bodies and minds and those that do not, then this is far greater than anything we saw before in history.

“And this time, if you’re not fast enough to become part of the revolution, then you’ll probably become extinct….”

While Harari is trying to open a discussion, a look at the ground-breaking university, government and/or corporate venture-backed companies working on producing “minds and bodies” is a nice way to start.

Bodies

While the big money and exits over the past 18 months have gone on innovative ways to fight cancer, such as Juno and Acerta, the disruptive companies to watch are able to edit the genome, often using a protein called Crispr (usually with Cas9 but maybe in future with the Cpf1 enzyme) and hence change people and their future generations rather than just hack a few more years of life. 

Deals in 2015 include the three startups by the main researchers who developed Crispr, Jennifer Doudna (Intellia), Emmanuelle Charpentier (Caribou) and Feng Zhang (Editas):

Juno Therapeutics gave Editas Medicine $25m to develop cancer treatments with $22m in research and $250m in milestone payments, while Google Ventures was part of a large consortium investing $120m in Editas last year.

Switzerland-based biopharmaceutical company Crispr Therapeutics closed its series A and B rounds today having raised a combined $89m from investors including pharmaceutical firms GlaxoSmithKline and Celgene.

Intellia Therapeutics, a US-based company specialising in gene-editing, closed a $70m series B round featuring pharmaceutical firm Novartis and using technology from Caribou.

Caribou Biosciences, a US-based developer of cell engineering technology, separately closed an $11m series A round featuring pharmaceutical firm Novartis for its CRISPR-Cas9 technology, based on research conducted at the Doudna Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.

Outside of Crispr have been other genome-editing startup deals, such as US-based genome editing company Precision BioSciences, which raised $25.6m in an oversubscribed series A round featuring pharmaceutical companies Amgen and Baxter.

Minds

Outside of bodies and the quest for artificial intelligence or machine learning could be affected by a lot of things but certainly one of the most exciting is quantum computing for the sheer processing power it could offer.

And in this space, Canada-based D-Wave Systems holds an edge with Lockheed Martin, Nasa, Google, University of Southern California (USC) and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), already using their quantum computing systems since 2011. Late last year, Google  said D-Wave’s system was “100 million times faster than a normal computer”. D-Wave raised $29m at the start of 2015 “from a large institutional investor, among others” and has been backed by the US intelligence community through its In-Q-Tel unit for an aggregate $124m. (Side note, stock exchange CME Group in 2014 took a stake in D-Wave partner 1QBit so just outside the calendar year but also one to watch.)

Tomorrow, we will look at two more technologies and the deals that showcase their potential with two each day after that for the rest of the week. For feedback, ideas and suggestions, please let me know – James Mawson